DWi-P supports the pedestrian life of Lower Manhattan through sound and movement. DWi-P offers the sound of WaTER, supported by stairs, walkways, and ramps through a transparent community building that welcomes Lower Manhattan visitors to Battery Park City. Sound and a green roof permeated by stairs, ramps and walkways, link the Battery Park City Ballfields to North End Avenue through DWi-P’s WaTER façade: a unique digital artwork, activated through cellphone technologies.

DWi-P’s façade makes an edge to the Murray-Warren Passage, a new parkway link between Murray and Warren Streets. Visitors to DWi-P can walk along the Passage, adjacent to the inscribed score, or move up through the building, using exterior stairs and ramps built into the facade. hMa Principal Meyers catalogs DWi-P and hMa’s collaboration with composer M.J. Schumacher in her recently published book, Shape of Sound (May 2014, Artifice Books London).

DWi-P’s internal program continues the theme of water: the pool room and swim program are the principal program areas in the building. DWi-P is operated by Asphalt Green, an organization that specializes in teaching swimming. Graduates of the program have participated with U.S. Olympic Swim Teams. The program includes visits by previous Olympic team members.

Won Buddhist Retreat is another hMa project with Sound and Movement as part of an overall architectural program. The Won Buddhist Retreat emphasizes sound through a program where sound is programmed. The meditation hall is programmed for silence; other areas are designated for conversation.

At Won Buddhist Retreat, programmed movement is determined through walking paths, courtyards, and shaped roofs. Walking paths include predetermined paths through residential and public courtyards, for silent meditation; and nature paths through meadows, from the residential areas to the public domain of meditation hall and visitor’s center.

03/29/2015

Above: section - perspective through the facade of DWi-P: Digital Water i-Pavilion, by hMa. DWi-P takes on overtones of movement, thought, and time, and contemporary cell phone technologies.

Above: The facade of DWi-P. DWi-P: invisible buildings disappear as landscape; disappear as sound. DWi-P is Platinum LEED certified and located in Battery Park City's North Neighborhood. hMa are the designers for DWi-P and the North Neighborhood Master Plan.

Above: Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass, possibly the most famous work of art in the 20th Century. This piece by Duchamp suggests ideas about time, movement, space, and Einstein's Theory of Relativity, as well as a possible parable about male and female sexuality. Duchamp's painting presents thin metal forms captured between two panes of glass, within an ordinary, off-the-shelf, metal frame window.

Above: View from inside hMa's DWi-P. The Frit pattern on the wall is also a sound piece by New York composer, Michael J. Schumacher.

Above: DWi-P: a building, or a landscape behind glass. Is it simply sound? Is it water?

Above: DWi-P captures a human figure on the Murray Street ramp. At DWi-P, figures move through space with the secondary overlay of the Schumacher score. The score can be heard, through a cell-phone App.

Above: The delamination of DWi-P, at the southern end of the building, including the Passage that passes in front of the building. Layers of movement are captured within and through DWi-P's glass wall.

Above: hMa's study for the massing of the North Neighborhood. This study also depicts the 'sound field' reach of the DWi-P App. The area where visitors can hear the Schumacher score: WaTER.

This is not unlike the Duchamp Roto-Relief project: an exercise in understanding sound as form.

Above: the Entry Level plan for DWi-P. The Entry to the building is the only room that rises above the level of the roof. The roof is a Battery Park City park.

Above: 'Playing' the facade at DWi-P; to the right: a screen shot of the DWi-P App.

Above: two more screen shots of the DWi-P App.

Above: Screen-shots.

Above: View of Entry to DWi-P's Ballfield Terrace Park.

Above: View of the olympic-size pool from the entry : the main program for the Center is swimming, or Water.

Above: View of the pool and the Entry.

Above: the main level plan - reached by 'descending' - a staircase.

Above: comparison of two main stairs at DWi-P, designed to capture the act of 'Descending' from one space to another.

above: hMa : movement of the body through space.

Above: Main stair, inside DWi-P.

Above: Main Corridor along the glass wall, inside DWi-P.

Above: Olympic size pool : human movement through water.

Above: one of three ramps at DWi-P, from the Dance Studio: human movement.

Above: children play along the exterior ramp in front of DWi-P.

Above: Invisibility: the transparency of DWi-P's glass facade.

Above: Cevdet Erek - There. From the show 'Tactics of Invisibility' ; co-curated by Daniela Zyman and Emre Baykal. The show is co-produced by the Vehbi Koc Foundation, and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Erek's installation touches on the idea of invisibility.

Above: DWi-P at night: human movement inside and outside in the Passage.

Above: DWi-P : view to the World Trade Memorial Site, across West Street. Left: view of one of the fountains at the Memorial Site: both projects feature water.

03/20/2015

At Won Buddhist Retreat, hMa focused on an idea of invisibility and how invisibility is related to zero carbon footprint. But also literally - a series of wood buildings, placed on a wooded site, possibly the way to make them disappear is by installing wood screens in front, to blur the line between building and trees - using Asplund’s Woodland Cemetary as a precedent, for this procedure.

Let’s look at wood screens, and - what hMa refers to as: ‘Infinite Bleed of Edge’.

Above: A diagram of hMa's courtyards at the Won Dharma Retreat. hMa designed the courtyards to incorporate diagonal walking paths, building to building. The concept was that practitioners walk from void to void - in a z-shaped path.

Porches and steps: Won Buddhist Retreat is as much about the materiality of wood, as it is about the effort required to attain Zero Carbon Footprint. (the project is also a Brownfield Mitigation project).

back to where we started the journey: at the Won Buddhist Retreat Administration building courtyard.

hMa also refers to this project as: Geometry and No Space in the Landscape’. This is a project where hMa Designed the site master plan, in addition to five buildings on the site: a Meditation Hall that is a place of stasis, and four Residential Buildings that are dynamic in form, with fractal roofs.

Shown above: the site master plan model. The site was an abandoned rock quarry. The Satellite of the site (below) shows how hMa kept the existing drive into the site. hMa then sited the five buildings for the Retreat where the quarry had been. This is a Brownfield Mitigation project.

Above: the Retreat Meditation Hall, next to the Dining Hall / Administration Building. These two buildings create an entry courtyard, the first Retreat space visitors encounter.

Above: a wood bridge that connects the Dining Hall to the Meditation Hall Porch. When you go to the Won Dharma Retreat, visitors are allowed to speak in all areas, except the Meditation Temple

The Bridge was requested by the Clients as a transition space to bridge the gap between everyday life, speaking, and meditation, spiritual practice, and silence.

Above: Won Buddhist Meditation Hall this past August, with a silent yoga retreat. You can see the Meditation Hall with practitioners in yoga poses as part of the retreat. Half of the focus in the photo is on the wood column. In addition to energy, this project is very much about the materiality of wood.

hMa also designed the master plan for the 700-Acre site. The Buddhists requested that we use the residential buildings as places to initiat walking meditation. They requested that we layout a series of paths between buildings to guide where people walk. The diagonal shape of the paths mimicthe diagonal relationships between the four courtyard buildings by hMa.

Above, the Dining Hall: part of the Buddhist spiritual practice is centered around natural foods, and a plant based diet.

The Dining Hall is an important space in the Buddhist’s Ritual Beliefs. Whereas Meditation is a collective space where people gather for shared practice in silence, the Dining Hall is a collective space where people gather to eat and speak.

Meditation Hall and Dining Hall sit - side by side - as a contrast of elements.

03/18/2015

Architecture itself Is education and references ideas by its existence. For education, we present work by hMa Principal Victoria Meyers' students at the University of Cincinnati. Above: Images from Meyers' Seminar, 'Sound Urbanism/ Sound Ecology', at the University of Cincinnati. Meyers' seminar spent Spring 2014 ‘mapping’ sound sections through significant neighborhoods in Cincinnati.

Above, top of the image: student drawing of the Bridge over the Ohio River, separating Ohio and Kentucky. This is an area of intense industrial activity and shipping. Below, left side of the drawing: the Viaduct that crosses train tracks that lead to the main train station in downtown Cincinnati. When the Mid-West was a center of industrial manufacturing, there were hundreds of trains /day passing below this viaduct. Today there are a few trains/ day, and the train station is a museum. The sounds generated by trains coming through Cincinnati are different than they were 100 years ago.

In addition to drawings, students also made sound recordings of each section. The goal was to generate sections that explore visually and through sound, areas that register significant change to Cincinnati.

Above: Meyers' 2012 Graduate Studio at the University of Texas: Manhattanville M(w)EE. Students were asked to design a new Subway Station for the 125th Street Subway Stop in Manhattan. This is an area where the NYC Subway is elevated above ground. 125th Street is the lowest elevation in NYC.

This has become a significant stop on the # 1 Train because Columbia University is building a new Campus here. Students were asked to design a subway stop capable of handling 10,000 people /day. Each Student also developed a program to go with their stops.

We show two projects: one imagines a new Bio-Engineering Lab as a linear bridge over the elevated subway. The other project is a translucent Cube - an arts building - that hovers around the stop, with the subway passing through the base.

Meyers' Spring 2014 Studio, above. Meyers asked students to design a ‘Hacker-Maker’ building in downtown Brooklyn. The studio concentrated on the design of roofs, and open spaces for working.

The project from Meyers studio above, has a roof with fractal openings, where crystalline shaped skylights drop through the roof into the Hacker-Maker space. Hacker-Makers get randomly placed cubes to work in. The interface between two systems of form: the formalism of cubes and rectilinear space, juxtaposed to fractals and crystalline forms - creates a dynamic space for creative work.

Research is how we test our environment. It is ultimately - how human cultures grow. We are showing, above, hMa’s project - DWi-P - opened in 2014. DWi-P is a building that presents a complex overlay of Sound Composition / Glass// and Cell Phone Technology. DWi-P's glass Wall has a score etched on it, is embedded with Bluetooth, and has an App. The DWi-P App will read where visitors are in space, and visitors can point cell phones at the wall, and play the Schumacher composition, WaTER, etched on the glass as a frit pattern.

The image above shows Dr. Lene Hau, at Harvard. Dr. Hau is a Physicist doing research on the speed of light at Harvard. In 2006 hMa Principal Meyers wrote ‘Designing with Light’. For research on DWL, Meyers had several conversations with Dr. Hau.

hMa continued our conversations, and Dr. Hau had great influence on how hMa designed Infinity Chapel.

Materials make Reference to the world. Buildings (and landscapes) have meaning by how they are detailed with materials.

Materiality is important in hMa's projects, and is also important when we teach. Tactility refers to how we read space with our hands. The haptic sense is a way to understand space.

Glass is different from stone. Above, we show human hands, in reference to both materials. On the left - a hand touches glass; on the right, we show hand imprints on a stone cave wall in Patagonia.

Musicians and people who deal in sound understand materiality as timbre. Timbre is a term that describes the materiality of sound.

Timbre is affected, for example, by the materiality of a Musical Instrument. A metallic instrument wired for electricity sounds very different from the same instrument as an analog.

In architecture - timbre is registered through footsteps, or the voice. These can be ‘live’ and echo; or muted and soft. Both reactions are ‘soundings’ that give very different spatial readings. This reading relates partially at least, to the materiality of the space.

Large stone halls like Cathedrals sound different from small, informal residential spaces, where sound is muted by fabrics, and materials that absorb sound, and prevent reverberation.

Each space and each object in the hMa Diagram, above, has a ‘Timbre’: WaterFall Table has stainless steel beads that reference water; DWi-P is a glass façade that represents WaTER; the LightScore is a series of light waves, 'played’ onto concrete surfaces, at the Kitchen in NYC.

hMa uses stone, glass, steel and wood in projects, as a conscious way of referencing materials and Timbre in space. Trees are living organisms - cut using calibration to impose mathematic scaling onto an organic system. Digital Water i-Pavilion's (DWi-P) façade is a sound wall scored into equal divisions. At hMa's Holley House in upstate New York, parallel stone walls make a house.

Program is – whatever you - as the designer - make it. Program is like a movie script - it’s a fantasy. The program does not exist until the designer envisions it.

I will show four hMa Programs. The first program, shown above, is: Flatness of Space, or Infrathin, demonstrated by hMa's DWi-P and hMa's design for the Queens Museum of Art. Both of these are projects with complex programs, compressed within thin, compact sections, or Infrathin// or the 'Flatness of Space'.

hMa's program of 'Repetition' is demonstrated, above, by the Won Buddhist project, where repeating channels of wood as screens - and punched windows - create a clear sense of repetition in the buildings. To the right, benches and light lines at hMa's Infinity Chapel located in downtown Manhattan, create repetition. Above, the frit pattern of the Schumacher score on the facade of DWi-P, along with the repetition of steel mullions, creates a pattern of repetition at hMa's DWi-P, at Battery Park City in NYC.

hMa also creates programs based on 'Embedded Objects'. At the left, above, is hMa's Infinity Chapel, where a series of embedded spheres create a room with curved surfaces that filter light. At the right, Pratt Pavilion sits as an embedded object between two existing 19th century industrial brick loft buildings, at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, NY.

Above, we show an hMa project to demonstrate 'buildings with sound as their program'. Shown above is hMa's Ojai Pavilion also referred to as : - ‘Sound Vortex’.

03/16/2015

The title of my Talk : Silence, Lines, Woven Operations, and Fractals. These are operations that make architecture.Lines and fractals speak to mathematics. Mathematics is basic to Architecture. In the Medieval Era, Architects participated in guilds. Guilds passed knowledge about building, based on sacred geometries, from generation to generation. They used knowledge about geometry and stone to build structures – Cathedrals - that we would be unable to build as stone-masonry today.

Silence and Woven Operations - speak to my Philosophical position of design. I prefer to be ‘Silent’, but thoughtful, in my use of materials, mathematics, and form.I foster ‘silence’ in my work by using ‘woven operations’ to make buildings that blend into environments.

SEMPER: In order to achieve Mathematical and philosophical Goals as architects hMa uses a series of Tools: I am presenting 6 Tools, represented by the letters : S E M P E R.

- By creating open conversations through concrete tube connectors between floors - at Infinity Chapel.

Education – Architecture is ‘Education’. Medieval cathedrals were historical chronicles of towns where they were built. Contemporary architecture is, likewise, a chronicle of modern life.

Research - In a fast changing world - it requires constant research for architects to maintain a relevant Practice.

I want to go into Greater Detail about Each of these Operations

Infinity Chapel - Geometrically formed series of surfaces designed to frame light. The surfaces reference an idea about the 4th Dimension (time) through ts form (hyper-cube), and through the movement of daylight. The Chapel is a series of spherical shapes set within a rectangular building envelop.

The Chapel design includes ‘Sound and Light Wells’ - concrete boxes - that connect a street-level Chapel and Reading Room to a Basement Sunday School below. They also mark a path - from MacDougal Street, through a Reading Room, to the Chapel.

‘Sound and light wells’ cut through the floor of the building, and connect the entire compound visually, and through sound.

In contrast to the Dynamic nature of Infinity Chapel hMa’s Won Buddhist Meditation Hall is designed for stillness, underlined by Silence. The Won Buddhists requested a program of Silence for a simple rectangular building for Meditation.

On the same site, hMa designed four dynamic buildings with fractal roofs where architecture uses the dynamism of fractal form to sponsor walking meditation through landscape.

‘Systems’ – can include Game Theory. Games sponsor movement.

This shows John Cage a Composer, and Marcel Duchamp, a Visual Artist, possibly the two most important Artists of the 20th Century - playing chess. Duchamp and Cage saw Chess as a way of understanding the world through an aesthetic system – a series of decisions related to program - governed by the cartesian grid –

Chess, like architecture, demands that whoever plays has the ability to calculate the ramifications of movement through space, several steps ahead. I love the work of Duchamp also because I love his concept of ‘Infrathin’, and its application to Space and Spatial systems of Design. I love Cage’s sound creations - a body of work based on a counter-point to the idea of ‘Silence’.

These 2 concepts – Infrathin - or Infinitely thin space;and Silence - have reverberated through my work as an architect.

Contemporary artists use systems to generate algorithmic interpretations of materials and space. At MIT, Skylar Tibbitts and his SJET Lab - create self-Assembling- programmable objects with the potential to redefine our concept of sculpture, materials, and construction. Tibbits is stretching the limits of art and space - to include infinite variations of program and materiality through his application of mobility and movement to materials

This is a Project I will return to in Greater Detail: ‘Contains Real Hard Won Insight’ - a Text-based Sculpture to be built out of laser-cut steel and a collaboration between hMa and Bruce Pearson. Bruce is an Artist whose paintings embed hidden text within complex, fractal forms.

In our collaboration, the Text is constructed as an 8’ high steel spiral in the landscape. You walk a dynamic double spiral path and the experience is activated, simultaneously, by reading, and being embedded within, a text. In addition, the text itself – is embedded within a system of fractal shapes and the fractals have an equivalent importance to the text.

Movement through the piece is active through the dynamic shape of the walk ; the fractal form of Bruce’s art; and the text itself.

The spiral is in contrast to the horizontal, static nature of a Line, demonstrated by another project I will return to: Bridge - Studio. In this case a Linear Wood Frame building is a linear bridge, used as a writing and painting studio. The concept was to fabricate a Line or Plane in landscape.

A line is ‘zero’ - because it has no thickness - but is also Infinite – because it extends in both directions without end.

11/26/2014

Pierre Boulez, in his studio in IRCAM, the International Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics and Music, in Paris. IRCAM is one of the world's largest public research centers dedicated to musical expression and scientific research. Ircam opened in 1977. In the United States, the most comparable center available to sound research is EMPAC, located at Rensellaer Polytechnic, in Troy, New York. Empac's Director is Johannes Goebel, who previously was the Founding Director of the Institute for Music and Acoustics at the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medietechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany.

IRCAM: Above: IRCAM's International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music, 2011. Pierre Boulez, and Alain Connes, with Gerard Assayaz overviewing the discussion. The relationship between mathematics, music, sound, architecture, and urban space were part of the Sound Urbanism / Sound Ecology course at the University of Cincinnati, Spring 2013/ 14. The students looked at the programs and the design of Ircam, as well as EMPAC, as idealized projects for the study of sound, but also as institutions that altered the fabric of the cities and the regions where they were located.

The seminar looked at the writings on sound by Blesser and Salter. Above: Spelunkers, or people who explore caves, use aural signals to read the spaces that they investigate.

From Blesser and Salter: In the contemporary world, our sense of space as related to and read by sound, is disrupted by headphones.

Below: Cathedrals are spaces constructed from stone, for experiencing sound, as the hard surfaces, with high ceilings, combine to create enormous reverberation times, and create overtones, also referred to as 'echoes'. In some cathedrals there is sufficient reverberation from the hard surfaces and the volume of the space, that sounds can continue for ten minutes after an orchestra or choir have stopped performing.

The Seminar's investigation of sound reverberation includes Alvin Lucier's 'I am sitting in a Room' - a sound piece performed by Lucier at the October 2012 Venice Biennale, the 56th International Festival of Contemporary Music. Lucier composed the piece in 1969, and it is among his most famous compositions

Is Brian Eno is famous as a rock musician. Our interest is Eno's relationship to the Long Now Foundation and how Eno creates a link between bell sounds and Sound Urbanism and Sound Ecology. Eno makes this link through studies and publications tracking the history of bells. Most recently, Eno published CD liner notes for his CD January 07003. The CD is a collection of Eno's electronic recreations of the sounds of famous bells throughout human history, going back to 850 B.C.E.

Brian Eno's research into the history of sound, particularly bells, adds sound to the cultural traditions purviewed by the Long Now Foundation. Above, Stuart Brand, Neal Stephenson, and Danny Hillis, in discussion, seated in front of a model of the Long Now's 10,000 year clock. Eno's January 07003 is a collection of electronic recreations of famous bells through history, and also a preview of bells that will be sounded, electronically, by the Long Now Foundation's 10,000-year clock.

Above: Eno's list of bell studies, from different eras, for the Long Now Foundation clock.

Eno's CD liner notes from January 07003 covers the history of bells, and technologies associated with the fabrication of bells, including metallurgical formulations and alloys used through history to create bells.

Eno covers the difference between Egyptian bells ('closed bells', or crotals) and dates when small open bells were cast in northern Iran. By 850 BCE, Eno notes that Assyrian bronze founders experimented with the acoustic properties of different ratios of tin, copper and other metal alloys in bells.

Eno's detailed history of bell foundries moves forward to bells cast in Medieval Monasteries in Europe. Bell technologies were originally brought to Ireland by St. Patrick, who brought smiths Tasag, Cuana, and Mackecht, to the island in the fifth century CE. These smiths made forged bells. Cast bells were developed in Western Europe by the Italian Benedictines beginning in 530 CE. As the Benedictine Order spread, they established bell foundries throughout Western Europe, and became the main suppliers of bells to that area.

Eno discusses the 'advent of artillery cannon in the fourteenth century, (and how it) provided an unexpected boost to bell manufacture (as) the cannon used almost exactly the same alloy as bells, and was made by similar methods. In order to have the security of a local arsenal, cities offered foundry sites, and special privileges to bell founders who would settle within their walls. The same supply of metal used for cannon would go back to bells after hostilities were over.'

It is an amazing history, and I recommend the Eno liner notes to students of my urban design course, Sound Urbanism. Eno's essay gives perspective to the development of contemporary cities where governments give space and tax privileges to tech companies such as Google and Facebook, for example. Eno's argument gives a broad outline to the history of how urban spaces are formed, in relationship to contemporary technolgies, through time.

January 07003 is a collection of Eno's recreation of of famous bell tones, through history. Eno's CD and its accompanying essay gives a sense of the timbre and 'sound materiality' of bells, and discusses how sound operates as a primary determinant for urban boundaries and city forms. City limits in the past were established mainly in relationship to residents' ability to hear church bells, factory whistles, and other sound notations, including clock chimes, creating an aural order to urban space.

Brian Eno's album: music for airports, from 1978 paved the way for a genre of sound explorations. Above: Brian Eno with David Byrne, his collaborator in several sound projects.

In addition to sound studies and publications on Bells, and his career as composer, musician, and record producer, Eno spent several years creating color studies based on sound. In 2012 Eno published Scape, an Apple App, that allows users to develop sound compositions based on color diagrams.

Books by hMa

Victoria Meyers: Designing With Light
New York Architects Victoria Meyers and Thomas Hanrahan believe that architecture is an environment, 'pure space', manifested in nature. The principals of hanrahanMeyers architects (hMa) have established themselves as unique visionaries, incorporating light and sound into their arresting designs of pure forms. Founded in 1987, the firm specializes in residences, art centers, and community spaces. They design spaces from a vision that connects visitors with the natural world.
www.designingwithlight.us

The Conservation FundAs part of our nature based vision for architecture, hMa gives a percentage of the firm’s annual revenues to nature initiatives. This year, hMa funded ‘Wildlife Corridors’, through the Conservation Fund. ‘Wildlife Corridors’ provide natural zones through cities and towns that link animals with adjacent nature preserves. This initiative is one of several cutting-edge planning initiatives that forward thinking architects will be adopting as we seek to harmonize human habitats with nature and create sustainable development.